Computational Genomics and Metagenomics

Half Sabbatical 2015!

I spent four great months working with Milton Saier at UCSD. Milton built a very useful database on transporter proteins, The Transporter Classification database (TCDB), and his lab has developed several pieces of software to play and analyze the database looking for such things as homologs that have diverged beyond the limits of detection by common sequence comparison tools. It was my privilege and honor to help Milton’s lab update and improve some of these tools, and develop a couple new ones. The tasks also gave me a lesson about sharing software, no matter how complex or simple.

In any event, I’m still working on some specific projects that we started during my visit, and feel full of new ideas, for example about detection of protein domains. I expect that these ideas will complement work that’s been going on in my lab on assignment of functions to homologs with highly divergent sequences.

In short, this was a sabbatical as they should be. I learned a lot and got inspiration for new projects that I would have never thought about before this visit.